It includes senior figures from many of the most recognisable brands and companies operating in these countries, and aims to highlight the so-called "diversity deficit" in the workplace.

Speaking about the ranking, UPstanding's co-founder Suki Sandhu said: "There is a diversity deficit at the very top of organisations in both the UK and the US. We whole-heartedly believe that making diverse role models visible and celebrating them is the most powerful way to address this as you are demonstrating to the leaders of tomorrow exactly what is possible for minority ethnic groups. The message of this list is that there should be no boundaries or barriers for your potential."

Two of the world's most powerful tech executives, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Microsoft's Satya Nadella — both members of the BAME community — are absent from the list as their respective companies chose not to nominate them for the ranking.

21. Baroness Shriti Vadera, Chairwoman of Santander

Reuters/Stefan Wermuth

Baroness Vadera, who is of Ugandan-Indian origin, spent more than 14 years working as an investment banker before going into politics, taking a role as a parliamentary undersecretary in the Department for International Development in 2007. She was subsequently made a Baroness, and went on to take jobs in the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, and the Cabinet Office.

She took over as chair of Santander in March 2015, becoming not only the first BAME woman, but the first woman to become chairman of a major UK bank.

20. Leena Nair, Chief HR Officer at Unilever

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Nair, who is originally from India, went to university in the town of Jamshedpur. Since joining Unilever in 1992, she has risen to steadily through the company's ranks. In 2007, she became the first female member of Unilever's Indian operation, and in 2015, rose to be the consumer goods firm's global head of human resources.

19. Funke Abimbola, Company Secretary and General Counsel at Roche UK

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Working as the company secretary and general counsel for pharmaceuticals giant Roche's UK arm, Abimbola is one of Britain's most prominent BAME lawyers. She is also committed to mentoring and increasing diversity across society. She has previously given a TEDx talk, and tweets from the handle @DiversityChamp1.

Kablawi, based in London, is along with his US role, the CEO of BNY Mellon's international operation. He has worked in the bank's London, New York, and Abu Dhabi offices since joining in 1997. He is the vice-chairman of the Arab Bankers Association.

17. Nathaniel Peat, co-founder and CEO of Gennex

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Peat's primary role is as the chief executive officer of Gennex Solar, a company that specialises in making solar and renewable energy products. However, he also devotes much of his time to The Safety Box, a non-profit which tackles violent behaviour in children and aims to help them build entrepreneurial skills. Peat is of Jamaican descent.

16. Timothy Wilkins, partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer

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Wilkins is one of the most prominent BAME lawyers in the whole USA, specialising in corporate and M&A law. According to his employer, he is also a leading advocate on diversity and social justice issues in New York City. Wilkins was educated at Harvard, holding both a law degree and an MBA from the university.

15. Torrence Boone, VP Global Agency Sales at Google

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In his day job, Boone is responsible for driving Google’s worldwide strategy and multi-billion dollar business with marketing and advertising agencies. He was previously CEO of Enfatico, an agency created by advertising giant WPP.

14. Harish Sodha, executive chairman of Diversity Travel

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Sodha heads up Diversity Travel, a travel firm based in Manchester, which provides travel bookings and advice to clients in the charity, academic, and not-for-profit sectors. He is of Ugandan-Asian descent, having been expelled from his native Uganda during the reign of dictator Idi Amin in the 1970s.

13. Ime Archibong, director of strategic partnerships at Facebook

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Born in North Carolina, Archibong is the child of Nigerian immigrant parents, both of whom are university professors. He began his career in the tech sector working for IBM, which is renowned for its diversity initiatives.

"IBM [is] a hundred-year-old company that has been thinking about diversity longer than I’ve been alive. So, they had some really well-baked thoughts, visions, structures, and teams built up around thinking about diversity and how they wanted to approach it," he told Fast Company in 2015.

12. Chris Carr, EVP of licensed stores at Starbucks

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In his role, Carr is responsible for as many as 6,500 licensed stores that generate annual sales in excess of $3 billion. According to a 2015 Fast Company article, in response to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's controversial "Race Together Campaign,"' — sparked by the killings of unarmed black men Michael Brown and Eric Garner — Carr told the boss that race relations in America were in the middle of a "crisis."

11. Ken Olisa, chairman of Restoration Partners

Restoration Partners

Olisa is far and away the most recognisable black man in the UK fintech community, and holds a position as one of the most trusted and widely quoted people in the industry. In his current role as chairman of Restoration Partners, Olisa helps to build up startups through investments. He is of British-Nigerian origin.

As a senior employee at one of the world's largest hotel groups, Kornegay is up there with the most influential African American men in the US business community.

Whilst with Hilton, Kornegay has championed diversity initiatives in his department, including in the company's supply network. "We are committed to cultivating the economic vitality of communities in which we conduct our business and forging supplier relationships that reflect the cultural diversity of these communities," he said in 2012.

9. Karen Blackett, chairwoman of MediaCom

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As the chair of MediaCom, the UK's biggest media agency, Blackett can easily claim to be the most powerful black woman in Britain's ad industry. In 2014, she topped the Powerlist 100 ranking of the most influential black people in Britain.

8. Stacy Brown-Philpot, CEO of TaskRabbit

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Promoted to CEO of TaskRabbit — the online service that allows people to hire strangers to do household jobs — in April this year, Brown-Philpot is one of the most prominent black, female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. She previously worked as a M&A analyst at Goldman Sachs, and was once named as one of Forbes "40 under 40."

7. Ajay Banga, president and CEO of MasterCard

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Born in Pune, India in the 1960s, Banga was made CEO of MasterCard in 2010, having previously been the card company's COO. He is a major champion of diversity in the workplace, and in 2014, Banga spoke to graduates of New York University's Stern business school about the importance of diversity in driving innovation in business.

6. Minouche Shafik, deputy governor of the Bank of England

Bank of England

As the deputy governor for markets and banking at the Bank of England, Minouche Shafik is one of governor Mark Carney's most crucial lieutenants, overseeing one of the most crucial parts of the BOE's remit. She is known for being soft-spoken, but absolutely ruthless in her approach, with one former boss saying "there is steel inside the velvet glove," about Shafik.

5. Ruby McGregor-Smith, chief executive of Mitie Group

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Baroness McGregor-Smith was born in India in the early 1960s before moving to the UK. She became CEO of Mitie, the FTSE 250 listed energy and outsourcing company, in 2007, having previously been the group's finance director. She is the only Asian female CEO of any FTSE 250 company.

4. Tunji Akintokun, director of global virtual sales at Cisco

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Along with his role at computing giant Cisco, where he is a senior executive, Akintokun founded a social enterprise called Your Future, Your Ambition, aimed at inspiring children and young adults from ethnically diverse backgrounds into studying science subjects. In 2015, he won a National Diversity Award for his work.

3. Albert Cheng, COO at Amazon Studios

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Cheng, is the chief operating officer of Amazon Studios, the arm of the online giant tasked with creating original TV shows and movies. Previously he was the chief digital executive at US news network ABC before that. He grew up in Hawaii, and is of Asian-American heritage.

2. Manjit Wolstenhome, chairman of Provident Financial

Unite

Like many of the executives featured on UPstanding's list, Wolstenhome started off her career in banking, spending 13 years in investment banking, including a stint as the co-head of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein's IB division.

She now chairs the board of Provident Financial, a member of the FTSE 100, and is a strong advocate for diversity in the boardroom. "We urgently need many more women and black and ethnic minorities at the top if our boards are to reflect the diversity of our workforce and our customers," she said in an interview in 2015.

1. Muhtar Kent, chairman and CEO of Coca Cola

Reuters

UPstanding's top executive from the BAME community is Kent, who heads up what is probably the most recognisable consumer brand in the world.

Originally from the USA, but of Turkish origin, Kent worked his way up from touring Turkey in a van when he first joined Coca Cola in 1978, all the way to CEO in 2008, and chairman in 2009.

Kent is a huge champion of diversity, saying at a conference last year: "If you run a global business you really have to understand cultures, you have to understand languages, understand what is important to people in different parts of the world."